Correction!As it turns out, the only bad job is a job that’s a long way away and pays you significantly less than you’re used to.

Gosh, that was fast. Mere days after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty ignited something of a firestorm over the government’s vague plans for EI reform, those plans seem to be firming up. “Regular EI recipients will be expected to commute up to an hour to take a job and will have to accept work that pays 70% of their average income,” the National Post‘s John Ivison reports. He argues these are “reasonable changes, designed to remove disincentives to work” and “more closely align work and rewards.”

Ivison also argues that this was yet another poor policy rollout from a government erstwhile known for its “rigid message discipline.” On a somewhat related topic, Michael Harris, writing with vigour for iPolitics, argues the Tories are settling into the same decadent, self-entitled middle age that eventually undid the Liberals — he cites several examples, the most damning being the utterly shameless $1-million grant from Human Resources to a friend of John Baird’s. “Although Stephen Harper didn’t invent the special hubris that flows from unbridled power, his old self has all but disappeared under its transformative hand,” Harris observes. “The guy who once pilloried his own leader in the Reform Party for taking $31,000 a year in a secret pay subsidy with the words, ‘The whole idea of non-accountable expenses is not acceptable,’ doesn’t even tell reporters when the full cabinet meets.”

And now, back to EI. While the changes may be “reasonable,” they don’t sound particularly major — and as such, the Ottawa Citizen‘s editorialists don’t sound like they will approve. They’re thinking more along the lines of a total teardown. They cite a Mowat Centre study proposing that EI should “be there when workers need it; contribute to a dynamic labour force and enhance productivity; and treat workers equitably. … [T]he system we have now fails all three tests,” they convincingly argue, and it’s more than a few tweaks away from coherence.

On to other matters. “There is no way of knowing who won the election in Etobicoke Centre, and [Ted] Opitz has been sitting in the House of Commons, giving speeches and voting, without a legitimate mandate from the people of his riding,” Postmedia’s Stephen Maher observes of last week’s court ruling throwing out the election result. It is, as he says, “mind-boggling.” More mind-boggling was that the losing candidate, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, had to spend $250,000 of his own money to fight the result. And that for all we know, Elections Canada could be overseeing the exact same foul-ups in all sorts of other ridings. Of course it is logical to worry about a 26-vote margin of victory more than one of 10 times that size. But surely Canadians desire a higher degree of confidence in the conduct of their elections than that the right 308 people won.

Adios, AfghanistanIn an oddly breezy piece, TheGlobe and Mail‘s editorialists basically declare “job well done, out we go in 2014.” Ghastly business about all the death and dismemberment, of course, but Afghanistan is … well, let’s say slightly better off than it was before, and no longer a haven for international terrorists. So, that’s the bright side, such as it is. But surely any honest post-mortem has to acknowledge what an unholy mess this mission so often was. “Few want to admit it now. But the fingerprints of far too many politicians are on this file,” the Toronto Star‘s Thomas Walkom aptly observes.

Does anyone expect our ovine MPs to ask tougher questions next time around? We sure don’t. And when the Globe starts totting up the domestic gains — we “earned respect within NATO”; “the Canadian Forces gained in esteem among young people”; and we “at last shook off the myth of Canadian pacifism” — we get a bit queasy, frankly. You could use that sort of logic to justify participation in any war, couldn’t you?

“Some positive developments have occurred in the past decade,” Jeffrey Simpson writes in the Globe. “But against this progress, and weighed against the treasure spent in Afghanistan, what do we really have? A country that still resembles a narco-state, corrupt in almost every way, with a President of limited legitimacy and an insurgency somewhat diminished, it is true, but essentially biding its time until the latest iteration of a foreign invasion leaves, having done little, if anything, to change the essentially tribal, post-medieval nature of Afghanistan.” Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s more along the lines of what we’re thinking.

Almost Done!

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